This article follows on from my previous articles about the Arduino microcontroller; Sketch 1: Light Switch and Sketch 2: Light Sensor. In this article I cover an analogue sound sensor with LEDs displaying for the loudness (noise level) of the sound detected. I purchased a multi-pack of sensors a while back and there was a small sound and big sound sensor in that pack. I can’t remember the seller but there are plenty on Amazon and eBay. If you want the one I’m using in this example, you can find it here, Sound Detection Module For Arduino. You will note that

This is a walk through of installing Jira 8.1 on on a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS minimised server. The Atlassian website has instructions for installing Jira on Linux or other operating systems but there are so many references to other pages or other sites that I wanted to have everything in one place for one type of set-up. As I have previously set up a Ubuntu server on the Google Cloud Platform that I’m not using, I will use that. So, if you are starting from scratch and want to follow along see my previous article “Get a free Linux server

After writing about the free (for one year) server available from AWS (see here), I thought I would write about a similar free server from Google Cloud Platform (GCP). There is one main difference between the two; Amazon provide a micro-server for 12 months for free as long as you stay within the allowable package where as Google provide you with a $300 credit that can last up to a maximum of 12 months. Amazon limits the free server instance for your account; 750 hours up-time per month (i.e. one continuously on instance), 1 CPU, 1Gb RAM and a maximum

I’ve been running a couple of Ubuntu servers on AWS (not the free ones) for years that are still using PHP 5.5. Even though it is out of support I’ve kept with it. They host one of my old applications that I thought may be a problem on PHP 5.6 or later. I have two of these Ubuntu 14.04 LTS servers; one for test and one for production. I had a recent request to host another application that required PHP 5.6 as a minimum. These servers are under utilised so I went ahead and upgraded on the test server. Both

I always have doubts when I see a claim that something is free but I needed to set up a server for a short period of time and have it publicly available for a few months. It will host three small demo applications and the number of users will be very low and their activity non-intensive. I really didn’t want to purchase anything as it’s for a non-profit or go through the trouble of setting up a more permanent solution as it has no reuse after this exercise. I knew AWS had a “free” tier and so I wondered if

I’ve been meaning to follow up my previous getting started with the Arduino microcontroller article for a while now. Quite a long while as it’s almost three years. The other reason for writing this now is that my first article has been visited quite a lot recently, so I wanted to add to my electronics section. At the end of my last article I asked for suggestions of what to build next but didn’t have any responses. I thought I’d make a variation on my light switch example and have the light turn on when it starts to get dark

Last year, Google announced that they were shutting down the consumer version of Google+ (also known as Google Plus) from August 2019. The consumer version are the personal accounts available to individuals and not corporations. The reason that Google gave us was that it had not performed as well as a consumer product as they had hoped and the demands of consumers were difficult to maintain. Towards the end of 2018, Google discovered a second API bug during their own internal audit which they subsequently fixed. They have no evidence that anyone exploited this and that anybody was affected. They

I quite often forget how to switch between a negative and positive image or how to do an exact colour replacement when using Adobe Photoshop. Each time, I need to, which is not very often, I spend a bit of time working it out. As this has just happened to me, I thought I would make a note of the steps and make that into an article. I needed to switch colours in a 2-colour logo to from blue on a white background to white on a blue background. This would have been fine if the coloured image parts were

The .UK top level domain became available for general purchase from 10 June 2014 by Nominet. Nominet is responsible for all UK domain name registrations and had up until that date only provided second-level domains such as .co.uk or .org.uk. In fact the original intention for the UK sub domains was .co.uk for businesses and .org.uk for charities/non-profits before .me.uk was introduced for personal use. They also run .net.uk, .plc.uk and .ltd.uk for specialist use. The .uk domain is general purpose but they needed to make sure that previous owners of the second-level were allowed to purchase the general purchase

Over the last 6 months or so, I’ve been getting a few new user registrations on my WordPress blog every day or so. When I got a few on the same day, I got suspicious. So, I checked them out and found they were all suspicious. The username caught my attention as I thought, “Why would anyone add numbers to their name when they don’t need to”. It’s not like I have a lot of users and all names have gone. I figured that they must have been automated. I remembered that the default account on my site is a